The Gates of Delhi have long been underrepresented among the architectural and historical marvels of the city. History enthusiasts love them. The public imagination, however, has been captured by the more famous monuments and buildings appearing on many ready itineraries in travel magazines.
In April, tech giant Apple finally came to India. When it unveiled the artwork for the Delhi store, it was both a relief and surprise to find these pieces of Delhi’s history take centrestage.
Most of the Gates of Shahjahanabad — the Old Delhi — are lost to time. Only a few remain. They, nonetheless, remain one of the most potent symbols of the city’s storied past. As the Gates find their way to ‘cool crowd’ through Apple merchandise, we knock at these gateways to Delhi’s history.
In the middle of a busy traffic square, the Ajmeri Gate stands in solitude. Enclosed in a fence, the iron entry gate chained and locked. Makeshift shops and traffic obstruct the clear view that you’d expect upon seeing such a monument. Entry is prohibited. The only way to study it is to make a round of the fenced perimeter and peer through the vertical railing, all the while mindful of vehicles running on the road that don’t slow down near the monument. It is that rare to spot a visitor. On one side, auto rickshaws ply. It’s a weekend. Women haggle with the drivers about fare. Men zoom past on two-wheelers.
To the unacquainted, the Ajmeri Gate, once an important entry-point to the walled city of Shahjahanabad, may now look like a standalone building. To the acquainted, it’s a piece of the city’s past and present. A witness to the many lives Delhi has lived in the past few centuries. One of the four surviving gates of Shahjahanabad.
This is something you see at all Gates. The place is busy, but there are no visitors. The Gates aren’t places you visit. They’re buildings you pass by on your way to somewhere, without so much as sparing a glance, unless you’re an outsider who looks at these Mughal-era structures with amazement and curiosity, surprised at their quiet presence in the middle of busy traffic squares.
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It’s been a month since tech giant Apple opened the doors of Apple Saket, its second India store after BKC Mumbai. Ever since the news of Apple’s arrival into the city broke, headlines are filled with the details of the shiny new store’s offerings, and how it takes inspiration from the Gates of Delhi. Colourful artwork celebrating this slice of the city are peppered across the store, from LED screens to shopping bags and wallpapers on displayed devices. The art motifs, a resplendent combination of colourful arches — a feature unique to the Mughal architecture in India. The wallpapers celebrating the Gates are also available for download for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
The Gates of Delhi. The gateways to the city’s storied past. The sentinels that have witnessed the glory days and the fall of the Mughal empire, foreign looters and plunderers, rule of the Marathas, the blossoming of Old Delhi into a cultural hub, the uprising of 1857, the rule of the British, the Gandhian era, the sweet song of independence. They have seen it all, and some of them are still here. Witness to the many histories the city has lived since they came into existence some four centuries ago.
Twenty-five years after it began operations in India, it’s only fitting that an Apple store generates the buzz it has. And it’s only fitting that the tech giant steps into Delhi acknowledging this important part of Delhi’s architectural heritage and lived history.
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Though Delhi had seven cities before Lutyens’ Delhi (called the Eighth City of Delhi by historians), the term Gates of Delhi largely refers to the entry points of erstwhile Shahjahanabad — the seventh city of Delhi, named after its founder Shah Jahan, and now known as the Old Delhi.
Built between 1639 and 1648, the city was enclosed in a six-kilometre-long wall that had 13 entry points (gates or darwazas) and 12 wicket gates (khidkis or windows). Each of these gates had a name. Overlooking these gates were chawkis (posts) and quarters for the security personnel.
The wall, made entirely of mud and rubble at first, took four months to build. Then came heavy rains and the wall crumbled. That’s when the emperor Shah Jahan ordered for it to be rebuilt. It is often said that the city had 14 gates. The fact is that the 14th gate — the Calcutta Gate — was added by the British. It wasn’t there during Shah Jahan’s time because there was no Calcutta.
Beyond the wall and these gates was just wilderness.
The Gates were named after the cities they led to — it means the Lahori Gate was located at the beginning of the road leading to Lahore. The road from Kashmiri Gate led to Kashmir, and that from the Ajmeri Gate led to Ajmer.
Then where did the road from the Delhi Gate lead to? “It led to Delhi, which at the time was Mehrauli, because what we call Old Delhi now was Shahjahanabad," says Rana Safvi, author of Shahjahanabad: The Living City of Old Delhi, and many other books on Delhi’s history.
The odd one out here is the Turkman Gate. A misconception is that it was named so because it faced Turkey (Turkiye). In fact, it derived its name from Sufi saint Hazrat Shah Turkman Bayabani who died in 1240, the year Razia Sultana died, and who once lived in the wilderness near the location of the gate. A shrine of the saint still exists near the Turkman Gate.
“It is also important to remember that these gates were the markers of important trade routes, because the roads that started there led to these cities for a reason. In that sense, the Gates tell important stories of economic conditions and culture of the time," says Rana Safvi.
The wall is now largely gone. Of the 14 gates, only four — Kashmere Gate, Delhi Gate, Ajmeri Gate and Turkman Gate — have survived the test of time. All these are now protected heritage monuments.
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The condition of the other three remaining Gates is no different than the Ajmeri Gate. Restoration work has been carried out, but public apathy — reflected in litter and streaks of pan masala and stench of urine — has defaced the surroundings.
At Delhi Gate, restoration work is going on. I’m not allowed in, so after some requests, the contractor, Ram Nivas, walks up to the gate. He has been shaping a slab of stone. “It’s sandstone,” he tells me. “All that you see is also sandstone,” he says, pointing towards the arch and then the facade. A cement of interesting ingredients — lime, bael pathar, Jaggery and some other elements — is ready and waiting to be used. That’s how the stones are glued.
The Delhi Gate, too, is on a busy junction. But in the absence of vehicles crowding its fence, it looks majestic against the unusually grey summer sky. The peepal tree outside the fence quivers in the breeze. Then some vehicles honk and the sounds of today take over the echoes of the past.
The surroundings of the Gates are as altered from their original form as can be. On what would once have been bare land guarded by these structures and the wall connecting them, a tangle of shops and residences and lanes had claimed reign. But if you turn your back on it, and take a long deep look at what remains of the Gates, you may hear the whispers of the past centuries swooshing by. Their premises have a barren stillness. The world outside is a different story.
I have seen these Gates before, but never like this, never as a visitor trying to imagine them in the world and time they were built. I haven’t sought the Gates but seen them, like locals do, unamazed and unsurprised. Simply because, in Delhi, you are confronted by relics of history too frequently, and get to see them too often to pause and ponder.
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The Gates themselves aren’t the whole story. They are parts of a larger story, which to an unfamiliar person only makes sense when looked at in the context of the seventh city of Delhi. This may be the reason why there’s so little awareness among tourists about their existence.
Home to some architectural marvels like the Qutub Minar, the Humayun Tomb, the Red Fort, the Lotus Temple, Delhi is one of the top tourist destinations in India. It comes as a surprise then how little fame the Gates of Delhi have gained as tourist spots.
Eshan Sharma, heritage activist and founder of Karwaan, a student-led history and heritage promotion initiative, rues a lack of stories around these important markers of Delhi’s history. “These Gates without the context of the city have nothing to attract the audience. When you tell the story — that these were the gates that people used to come into the city and to leave it, that’s when it makes sense. Unfortunately, this is absent in our stories of Delhi,” he says.
Sharma and his group have been organising some curated walks in Old Delhi with the intention to create awareness and keep the conversation going.
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The Gates today aren’t just a reminder of the time they were built in, but they have their own stories. It was the Kashmiri Gate that the British breached to enter the walled city during the Revolt of 1857, and the city finally fell. The Gate was almost entirely destroyed during the revolt and ensuing British action.
Some of the stories are associated with tragedies in Delhi’s recent history. The Turkman Gate massacre of 1976, for example.
Not all stories though have historical records to back them. Many have passed down from generation to generation and are now nothing more than oral lore. One of the commonly told stories is that of the Delhi Gate. It is said that some criminals were killed and buried in the foundation of the Delhi Gate before the construction started. Historian Sohail Hashmi considers them just stories. “Many of such stories came into existence over time and stayed because they were interesting,” he says. “There are no records to support any such claims.”
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The deterioration of the Wall and the Gates began with the downfall of the Mughal Empire. The reason was mainly a lack of upkeep.
“It is a funny thing. The Mughal empire began to collapse after the death of Aurangzeb, but the flowering of the city as the hub of culture happened after that. It is the time of Mir and Ghalib. It is the time Dakhni Urdu reached Delhi and many of the great Persian poets residing in Delhi started writing in this language," Hashmi says.
The Gates of Shahjahanabad are a witness to all this. Through them, the great poets entered Delhi; through them, the revolutionaries and the plunderers entered the city. Even when the imperial might of the city began to wane, Delhi remained an important centre of culture and trade, and the Gates remained the gateways to the city. The structures stand still and the world rushes around them, prompting the imagination to fill the gap between what you’ve read and what you are seeing.
Records indicate that in 1911, when the British shifted their capital back from Calcutta to Delhi, all the 13 gates were there. Some were not in very good condition, but they existed. The wall is mostly gone, but survives in places. The deterioration of the wall started specifically after Independence, mainly because Shahjahanabad didn’t need to be guarded from anything anymore. Delhi, the capital, spread outside the walls of Shahjahanabad and there was no more a need for a boundary to separate the two.
“Pandit Nehru’s dream was that the new and old Delhi become one. For that, he wanted part of the wall to go, because then these two cities would actually become one city,” says Sohail Hashmi.
So to ensure a seamless transition from old to new Delhi, a large chunk of the wall was demolished. But before anything could happen, builders moved in and started constructing 40-50 feet tall buildings. The old wall, which was 10 feet high, was gone and in its place grew concrete partitions, making the division between the two cities even more stark.
As for the Gates, they were mainly lost to time and neglect. “Because they didn’t get much attention, people began to live in many of the Gates. Some of them were encroached upon to an extent that they became one with shops and residences,” says Eshan Sharma.
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The Gates, with their red sandstone and ornate arches, are arguably the most potent symbol of Old Delhi, once a world-famous centre of culture and trade, besides its old bazaars, of course.
The Gates may not be architectural marvels in themselves, but the history they’ve witnessed is story for ages. Their mere presence, an echo through time. The markers of the city’s past glories and battles, all the realities that make Delhi the city of today.
At a time when India is one of the world’s biggest economies, history has been brought forward. Past segues into present. It’s a time when India is emerging as one of the most powerful global forces. Biggest tech companies in the world are keen for a big bite of what the country has to offer. Apple has made its move.
Created as the world’s best city at the time, Shahjahanabad, although withered with time, is still very much a part of the India story. Once hallowed entryways to Delhi, the Gates are now portals to a globalised economy. There is history in each stone, and they continue to witness the many histories in the making.